Well, it’s Wednesday Dec. 21 and it’s only a few days until Christmas – four to be exact. Most people right now are doing their last minute shopping or waiting for a few remaining deliveries from UPS, FedEx and the like.

It’s amazing how fast each Christmas goes by. It seems just like yesterday that Sophie was experiencing her first Christmas. Now she is 18 months old and seems like a completely different person (in a good way, of course).

I hope that as each Christmas goes by the love in our family gets stronger and stronger for one another, and just like how most good times go, we say, “Wow, it’s already over?” or “It’s already Christmas again?”

That’s all I want for Christmas this year.

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Maritza our housekeeper said today that she thinks that the last rains of the rainy season have gone away, and that there will only be “mucho sol” now. I’m looking forward to it. However, even though I’m not a big fan of when it rains for four or five days on end, or when it’s foggy and gloomy for a week at a time, I do like the rain. I like going to sleep here and listening to it bounce off the roof of the house. And how every now and then the walls will creak in the night as a gust of wind tries its best to blow us away.

The last couple of days when we drove home through the hills and valleys outside of San Ramon toward the house that we are renting, we smelled fresh flowers even though the windows were rolled up.

I wonder if it’s because the flowers are ready to come out and play now that the rainy season is over too.

Today Sophie did just that and it was so much fun. She and I stepped outside and went straight over to our favorite orange tree. We’ve been pulling oranges off of it for many weeks now. The only ones that are left are up really high. In order to grab them I have to put Sophie on my shoulders and then jump. She loves it and lets out deep belly laughs as my feet move away from the ground.

Far on the other side of the yard there are some homemade benches that are set up on top of some cinder blocks that sit under some tall over-hanging trees. Today Sophie sat in my lap and we listened to the rustle of the wind through the leaves and ate three oranges, in the coolness of the shade. They tasted good and were very tart and sweet.

It was fun. I hope I don’t forget that!

So Saturday night is here, SaturDAY has come and gone, but we had a lot of fun today and have some new memories that I’m sure we won’t forget – but first, a little business… I apologize if anyone has had trouble loading the blog the past few days! There was some sort of glitch that was making it run slow. All is well and done now, though, so back to writing!

This morning we woke up bright and early around 7AM. This was not the first time, however, that Sophie and Mommy woke up. It was more like the 12th time they woke up when the clock chimed seven times this morning. I’m not sure what the deal was, but Sophie woke up a bunch last night, nonetheless, Mommy was a champ about it and soldiered through the day, and so did little Sophie.

Mommy made extra strong coffee to help lubricate the brain and we were off and running on our way to breakfast at Hotel Villa Blanca. The weather was perfect to start off today, only a few clouds in the sky scattered amongst a beautiful blue. I like the sky here when it’s not cloudy – you don’t see any trails from airplanes and the color of the blue is just like the color of the ocean when you watch a Corona commercial on TV. Pure blue.

Once we got to Hotel Villa Blanca the resort was pretty quiet and low-key, I made another friend this past week named Pablo (Alexis’s nephew) who works there and he said there was only 7 out of 35 units occupied. In lieu of this, I think they skipped the breakfast buffet that they usually have and put out a simple breakfast menu. It was still really good though, and Sophie behaved pretty well. Actually, when I say “behaved pretty well” I thought about what is considered not behaving well for her and it really isn’t a matter of her being bad. Sophie is such a curious cat, she just wants to go out and sponge up everything that surrounds her. She is like a bee or a butterfly landing from flower to flower, when she is in a new place (or just about any place) for that matter, she wants to be on our own two feet and leave no stone unturned. I guess she gets that from her parents.

After we ate breakfast we went on a hiking trail at the hotel and looked at a bunch of tropical plants and then ended up settling on a couple of benches overlooking rolling hills. It was very beautiful, Sophie played there for 20 minutes – maybe more. She wanted to climb up and down off the bench and then sit on the ground and play with the rocks. When we first go to the benches I didn’t want to stay long because I wanted to go to the volcano up the road (which we hadn’t been to yet, it is a huge tourist attraction here – not sure why in hindsight but will explain). However, seeing Sophie infatuated with something as simple as climbing up and down on benches, or looking at different rocks, made me just want to sit there and let her be.

I wish we all could slow our thought processes down and just enjoying the moment like Sophie does all of our lives, and I hope that Sophie’s mind doesn’t speed up too fast and she can enjoy a long time of doing everything it is that she likes to do… before life gets in the way.

It is nice down here though, for example, Alexis and Maritza would give us the shirt off their back if we asked. They live in a small house with eight people, I think (a combination of kids and one grand-daughter). Yet, whenever we give them something they always give us something back… literally:

-I bought Alexis a six pack of beer and then he gave me 17 empty beer bottles so that I could get a huge discount the next time I went to buy beer (if you bring your empty beer bottles back to the grocery store here they give you a credit for them).
-Michelle made Alexis breakfast yesterday and then he stopped by last night to give us special Costa Rican coconut desserts.

I could do a whole separate blog post on this alone, there are probably a dozen or two dozen examples of just the two things above (and those are just in the last two days or so). The saying that everyone says here in Costa Rica to each other is, “pura vida” which means pure life. Now, I’m sure that there are a bunch of rotten eggs mixed in with the good ones here, but the people that we are around the most here have been some of the most helpful and unselfish people we have ever met, and they don’t ask for anything in return. They refuse to let you give them anything in return.

Pura vida.

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So back to our day today, we finished up at Hotel Villa Blanca and headed off to the Volcano! It is an actual live and active volcano with lava running out of it, which none of us have ever seen before, so we were really excited. Let me tell you though, the idea was way cooler than the reality.

First off, our plan was that Sophie would be tired after breakfast and would sleep all the way to the volcano… WRONG. More like, Sophie would go to sleep 10 minutes before we get to the volcano and then sleep the whole time we were there. Unfortunately, this was only the first mosquito bite that started itching on our volcano adventure. The second one was that the road there is SUPER WINDY and the other 17 month old in the back of the car (Momma) does not like windy roads. Nor does she like super windy roads. I drove and drove listening to Sophie fuss and Momma burp with bouts of nausea. Oh well. Me being the patient and tough guy that I try to be allowed me to persevere – I was not going to let the two issues of the females in the back of the car rain on my parade.

Until it literally rained on my parade.

Everyone here says it is 1 1/2 hours to the volcano. It’s more like two hours. Okay, no big deal, so two hours in the car and we drive around this corner and see this huge volcano… awesome! Right about this same time, little Sophie falls asleep… double awesome! Unfortunately this only lasted about 10 minutes because the volcano disappeared into a cloud which was the lead horse in a cavalry of dark storm clouds that ended up monsooning allover the whole town as soon as we got there.

No lava. No volcano. Nothing.

Except the urge to go to the bathroom.

So we had to pull over because I drank to much coffee at breakfast and I ran through the monsoon into a hotel lobby so I could use their bathroom really quickly. Then I ran back to the car (damp with rain by this point) and hopped back in.

Oops! Closed the door too loud! Sophie is awake now!

She wasn’t in a bad mood though. She got her little half-hour power nap in but unfortunately it was raining cats and dogs at the volcano so Momma and I made an executive decision to turn around and go back home.

The drive back was pretty uneventful until we stopped at a restaurant/hotel owned by Israelis that also run a pet-rescue there. We only saw one cat and one dog, but apparently they have 200 cats and dogs there. Crazy. We had some hummus, cappucino, a latte, and a cookie for the road, and left to come home.

Even though we didn’t get to see lava or spend more than 20 minutes at the volcano, it was still a very fun day. Sophie had a blast and was in an awesome mood tonight (Momma made some Costa Rican soup with fresh vegetables) and we all relaxed and enjoyed not being in the car. Sophie took her shower and zonked out right afterward. She didn’t even watch any Sesame Street or anything before bed.

It’s always nice to see Sophie so tired at the end of the day. It makes me feel like we lived the day to the fullest and that we put our little girl into bed with her tank on empty.

Our tanks are on empty tonight too. We all had a great and fun day together.

Now it’s time to go to bed.

…well the clouds parted for a little bit today and for the better part of the morning and early afternoon we all got to enjoy some good old sunshine and warm weather. Sophie, Mommy and I all hung out outside for a little while and Maritza made us Eggs, Gallo Pinto (rice, pico de gallo and black beans) with fried plantains – yum yum. Then, to top it off she made us papaya smoothies. We are pretty lucky. She also cleans up all of the plates, etc., and does the dishes after we eat.

Later in the afternoon the storm clouds rolled in accompanying by booming thunder, but that didn’t stop us from having a good time. Sophie finished taking her nap – or should I say was rudely awoken by a little barking psycho white dog that resides with us at this house – and we packed up and headed over to the San Ramon “mall” for a some window shopping. Inside was an H&M, a surf shop with a bunch of American brands (albeit expensive), Burger King, McDonalds, KFC, and a huge grocery store.

Our new mission here is to find chicken broth. For some reason it’s nowhere to be found at any of the three grocery stores we’ve been to so far. As it turns out, there are a bunch of things we eat that has chicken broth in it. I emailed my friend Pablo so hopefully he’ll give us the low-down on where the goods are.

Other than this, Sophie stayed up a little later tonight. She ate a great vegetable dinner that Momma made (broccoli w/ cheese, brussel sprouts, and Momma’s special potato recipe). After dinner she watched a bunch of YouTube and then when she still wasn’t tired she came outside to take the dogs out with me. When a loud truck drove by while we were out there she pointed and said, “Car” – she is so smart and is doing new things and saying new words and sounds every day. Ah – how could I have forgotten, she also learned tonight how to blow on her arm and make farting noises. So for about 10 minutes she sat on the couch with me making fart noises and laughing – Michelle got it on video I think.

Anyhoodle, that’s about it for today! I’m starting to get tired and am looking forward to going upstairs and crawling in bed. I’m looking out the window at lights of a far off town set on a distant hill with a thunderstorm looming over it. You can’t tell there is a thunderstorm there except for every now and then when a big bolt of lightning illuminates the silhouette of a gigantic cloud. If it comes over here it will be perfect to go to bed to. The sound of the rain on the roof along with the rumble of thunder is the perfect white noise, and there are also no tornados to worry about in San Ramon.

A few funny things Sophie did today:
-wanted Mommy to hold her in pouring rain so she could freak out and make Sophie face (she flails her arms in excitement and makes a silent scream face)
-she’s eaten 5 or 6 bananas in the last two days and was a little constipated today so she was walking around the bedroom and then intermittently lying on the floor in different places sticking her butt in the air and grunting while trying to push a poo out
-we went out to lunch and there was a Christmas tree in the cafe (a place called Cafe Aroma) and she kept trying to make a break for it so she could grab the ornaments off of it
-outside the cafe a girl walked by with an jce cream cone and Sophie reached up to her in passing hoping she would hand it to her
-Sophie ate her own pistachio ice cream cone by herself (at an ice cream place called Pop) – she doesn’t understand how to angle it when eating it though so everytime she takes a bite she smashes the whole cone into her face and gets ice cream all over herself
-when Sophie pooped today and Mommy showed her the diaper she said DOO DOO
-Sophie learned how to hang queso palmito (the Costa Rican equivalent of string cheese) from her mouth and then shake her head so that a long string of cheese flies all around – she then walked around the kitchen swinging her head around like a crazy person doing her new cheese swinging trick

Every time Sophie wears her “I Love Dad” pajamas it makes me feel like the luckiest person in the world.

She does so much more for me than I can ever do for her.

Mommy had to work to put the Sophie monster down tonight but they’re both out cold now and I’m about to join them! Michelle watched Sophie a bunch today so I could work.

I am so lucky to get to be alive with these two girls.

…so I installed a program on my phone that lets me update the blog. Here goes!

We’ve been here a couple of weeks now and are settling in. Michelle made our fav. spaghetti recipe last night and it was really nice to have a meal like we used to have back home in Chicago.

We went to a new grocery store in a place called Bajo Zuniga yesterday and got tons of veggies and some fruit for less than $20. It was also fresh and came from some local organic farmers.

The weather was pretty crappy when we first got here but there have been some awesome days full of sunshine since then. The rainy season is coming to an end – they say it usually lasts until the middle of November.

It makes us really happy seeing Sophie outside playing in the sun. She has a bunch of toys (we packed an entire suitcase) yet she loves going outside, examining plants and playing with the cats and dogs we are renting along with her house (they came with it).

Sophie had so much fun today that she tried to zonk out a 6:30PM. We gave her a shower early and she and Michelle watched Sesame Street in YouTube for a bit.

Now she’s out like a light…